Failed multiculturalism and limited freedoms: Browning in the terror panic context

We are supposedly living in post-race times. This refers to a deconstructive approach to identity and social relations, in an attempt to move beyond traditional constructions of race. More recently within the terror panic context, post-race discussions have specifically been considered within debates about citizenship, community cohesion, multiculturalism and securitisation. This has produced a multiculturalism - national identity - terrorism narrative that makes reference to inclusiveness and legalistic measures for combating racism, and yet in reality results in the securitisation of race-relations and black and minority ethnic populations. The ‘war on terror’ has been articulated in ways which produce a new mode of racism and ethnic discrimination, for instance what can be referred to as ‘xeno-racism’. This allows discriminatory practices to continue in ever more intensified, state ‘legitimated’ and publically accepted ways, i.e., consider the regimes of racial spatialization and bodily control in stop and search practices under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) and sections 44 and 45 of the Terrorism Act (2000). Using the case of the recent terror panics, in particular its narrative around the ‘Islamic terrorist’ and the process of ‘browning’ – and by drawing on the preliminary findings of a small qualitative study that examined racialised experiences of surveillance in Manchester (England), this paper looks at how constructions of deviance continue to draw on an already embedded racist discourse, which is delivered within rhetoric of anti-Muslim racism, failed multiculturalism and white superiority